The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer. Concurrent with the expansion of networking technologies, an expansion in computing power has resulted in development of affordable computing devices capable of taking advantage of services made possible by modern networking technologies. This expansion in computing power has led to a reduction in the size of computing devices and given rise to a new generation of mobile devices that are capable of performing functionality that only a few years ago required processing power that could be provided only by the most advanced desktop computers. Consequently, mobile computing devices having a small form factor have become ubiquitous and are used to access network applications and services by consumers of all socioeconomic backgrounds.
As a result of the expansion in networks and evolution of mobile computing devices, mobile computing devices are increasingly being used to access data resources over networks. One such data resource that may be accessed over a network is a data set including data items having associated locations. For example, a data set may include a database of restaurants having an associated physical location. Thus, for example, a user may use his or her mobile device to search for restaurants near his present location. In order to facilitate searching the data set by location, also known as spatial querying, the data items may be indexed by geohashes, which may be used to encode the locations of the data items in the data set.